OR Books is proud to announce a new series: Decolonize That! Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas. Edited by Bhakti Shringarpure, academic, activist, and editor of Warscapes magazine, these are pocket guides for the perplexed. Next up is Decolonize Journalism, with Decolonize Environmentalism, Decolonize Museums, and many more to follow.

“Ever since Norman Mailer styled himself as a ‘White Negro’ and Anatole Broyard passed as a white jazz fan, the hipster has been a subject of fascination in cultural criticism, a symbol of the love and theft at the heart of American popular culture. Grégory Pierrot’s fiercely illuminating short book dissects the political complacency and racial delusions of hipsterism, but it does so with a verve, swagger and irreverence. Pierrot provides us not only an anatomy of hipsterism’s past, but a vision of its possible future. ” —Adam Shatz, editor of Prophets Outcast

“In recent years, cultural institutions, click-bait publications, and lazy influencers have emptied ‘decolonizing’ of its revolutionary, indigenous substance. The Decolonize That! book series provides a tongue-in-cheek perspective on these co-optations and is a useful toolbox to think through these ideas. Series editor Bhakti Shringarpure continues the crucial work she started with Warscapes magazine by bringing together a wonderful community of thinkers around questions of struggles, borders, and narratives. ” —Léopold Lambert, editor-in-chief of The Funambulist

Few urban critters are more reviled than the hipster. They are notoriously difficult to define, and yet we know one when we see one. No wonder: they were among the global cultural phenomena that ushered in the 21st century. They have become a bulwark of mainstream culture, cultural commodity, status, butt of all jokes and ready-made meme.

But frightening as it is to imagine, for more than a century hipsters have been lurking among us. Defined by their appearances and the cloud of meaning attached to them—the cool vanguard of gentrification, the personification of capitalism with a conscience—hipsters are all looks, and these looks are a visual timeline to America’s past and present.

Underlining this timeline is the pattern of American popular culture’s love/hate/theft relationship with Black culture. Yet the pattern of recycling has reached a chilling point: the 21st century hipster made all possible past fads into new trends, including and especially the old uncool. In Decolonize Hipsters, Grégory Pierrot gives us a field guide to the phenomenon, a symptom and vanguard of the wave of aggressive white supremacist sentiment now oozing from around the globe.